Facebook forces all users over to @facebook.com e-mail addresses
If you are on Facebook but have never taken a particular shine to Facebook's e-mail capability, Facebook is intent on changing your mind. As of Friday, the company seems to have quietly given or replaced the display e-mail addresses of all of its users with an @facebook.com address, routing any e-mail communiques you would have received back to its own Messages inboxes.
Facebook began its jaunt as an e-mail service in November 2010, when it started allowing users to make @facebook.com addresses and receive conventional e-mails addressed there in their messages inboxes. The service was intially hailed as a Gmail replacement, but caught on about as well as Facebook Gifts and Facebook Places (both of which are dead, in case you were wondering). Gervase Markham noted in a blog post on Friday that his display e-mail address, formerly a personal one, had been changed to an @facebook.com address without any action on his part.
If you find your display e-mail has been hijacked by a facebook.com domain, fret not; a quick edit of the settings will let you restore a personal e-mail address (edit Contact Info, then select the facebook.com email to be "hidden from timeline." Select another to be "shown on timeline," if you desire). Security researcher Ashkan Soltani points out a choice phrase from Facebook's post announcing the addresses in November 2010: "We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one." And everyone else, apparently. Facebook has provided the following statement on the change:
Quote:
As we announced back in April, we’ve been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site. In addition to everyone receiving an address, we’re also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their timelines. Ever since the launch of timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own timelines, and today we’re extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address.
